Marcella was born in Ragusa. Her father used to work for Eni. During the first half of the 80s, when she was seven, she discovered the Village of Borca. Her older sister had already passed through it. In the next four years, she was able to come back there, and subsequently spent several summers between the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building) and the permanent tents camping. Two weeks each summer: this was the duration of the stay granted to the children of each Eni employee whose application had been accepted. The Village, and the mountain, greatly struck the imagination of this Sicilian little girl, who reached a precocious resolution: “… I’ve desired to come and live in these places from the get go. I’ve been determined to do so since I was, maybe, eleven…” Today, Marcella lives a few kilometers from Borca, and teaches in Cortina. Yesterday (December the 31st 2014), after 30 years, she returned to the Colonia, with progettoborca. Recovering her own nostalgias, memories, images, emotions. Together with a projects that wants to go forward, feeding off all of this, as well.
MGP: One sees the same things, but those things are read with the eyes of knowledge and experience. Those frames represent, to me, the perspective games that I used to play as a child. I would never understand why those small, square windows had a “random” arrangement, and I could never pinpoint the location of the outer and inner parts of said small window. I remember, once, asking another kid to stand in front of one of them, as I ran outside to try and guess to which one of the many openings it corresponded… The picture of the sloping roof, with the huge ledge running along its lenght, on the other hand, reminds me of the times when I tried to make the corners fit together… and how, as if by magic, I became aware of the sight’s deceit: when it looked like they might coincide with one another (the ledge’s with the roof’s) I closed the left eyes, and the conquered connection was lost: the corner of the ledge moved to my left, and the other way round when my right eye was closed. Even in this picture I couldn’t make them come together… I appreciated that architecture in a spontaneous way, in and age when one doesn’t judge beauty, but instead everything is naturally absorbed. I wonder if Gellner might have had in mind to stimulate the children’s curiosity with those unusual constructions, seeing as they used to be their main beneficiaries… he gifted us with matching colours, too. And all those walls and pillars, all in concrete’s natural colour, gave me the feeling of something unfinished… every year when I came back, I hoped they might’ve gained colours of their own, and instead they remained always the same… I truly am surrounded by a thousand feelings when I find myself in that place… that is where lay the roots of my passion for the mountain in general, and the Dolomites in particular…
Marcella Giulia Pace
